Authors: Cynthia Ozick
It did happen, nevertheless, that the young Babel was witness to a pogrom. He was in no way estranged from Jewish suffering or sensibility, or, conversely, from the seductive winds of contemporary Europe. Odessa was modern, bustling, diverse, cosmopolitan; its very capaciousness stimulated a certain worldliness and freedom of outlook. Jewish children were required to study the traditional texts and commentaries, but they were also sent to learn the violin. Babel was early on infatuated with Maupassant and Flaubert, and wrote his first stories in fluent literary French. In his native Russian he lashed himself mercilessly to the discipline of an original style, the credo of which was burnished brevity. At the time of his arrest by the NKVD in 1939—he had failed to conform
to Socialist Realism—he was said to be at work on a Russian translation of Sholem Aleichem.
Given these manifold intertwinings, it remains odd that Trilling’s phrase for Babel was “a Jew of the ghetto.” Trilling himself had characterized Babel’s Odessa as “an eastern Marseilles or Naples,” observing that “in such cities the transient, heterogeneous population dilutes the force of law and tradition, for good as well as for bad.” One may suspect that Trilling’s cultural imagination (and perhaps his psyche as well) was circumscribed by a kind of either/or:
either
worldly sophistication
or
the ghetto; and that, in linking Jewish learning solely to the ghetto, he could not conceive of its association with a broad and complex civilization. This partial darkening of mind, it seems to me, limits Trilling’s understanding of Babel. An intellectual who had mastered the essentials of rabbinic literature, Babel was an educated Jew not “of the ghetto,” but of the world. And not “of both worlds,” as the divisive expression has it, but of the great and variegated map of human thought and experience.
Trilling, after all, in his own youth had judged the world to be rigorously divided. In 1933, coming upon one of Hemingway’s letters, he wrote in his notebook:
[A] crazy letter, written when he was drunk—self-revealing, arrogant, scared, trivial, absurd; yet [I] felt from reading it how right such a man is compared to the ‘good minds’ of my university life—how he will produce and mean something to the world … how his life which he could expose without dignity and which is anarchic and ‘childish’ is a better life than anyone I know could live, and right for his job. And how far—far—far—I am going from being a writer.
Trilling envied but could not so much as dream himself into becoming a version of Hemingway—rifle in one hand and pen in the other, intellectual Jew taking on the strenuous life; how much less, then, could he fathom Babel as Cossack. Looking only to Jewish constriction, what Trilling vitally missed was this: coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless. Trilling saw only stasis, or,
rather, an unalterable consistency of identity: either lucubrations or daring, never both. But Babel imagined for himself an identity so fluid that, having lodged with his civilized friend, the St. Petersburg engineer, it pleased him to invent a tougher Babel consorting underground with a “tormented, drunken waiter.” A drunken waiter would have been adventure enough—but ah, that Dostoyevskian “tormented”!
“He loved to confuse and mystify people,” his daughter Nathalie wrote of him, after decades spent in search of his character. Born in 1929, she lived with her mother in Paris, where her father was a frequent, if raffish, visitor. In 1935 Babel was barred from leaving the Soviet Union, and never again saw his wife and child. Nathalie Babel was ten when Babel was arrested. In 1961 she went to look for traces of her father in Moscow, “where one can still meet people who loved him and continue to speak of him with nostalgia. There, thousands of miles from my own home in Paris, sitting in his living room, in his own chair, drinking from his glass, I felt utterly baffled. Though in a sense I had tracked him down, he still eluded me. The void remained.”
In a laudatory reminiscence published in a Soviet literary magazine in 1964—a time when Babel’s reputation was undergoing a modicum of “rehabilitation”—Georgy Munblit, a writer who had known Babel as well as anyone, spoke of “this sly, unfaithful, eternally evasive and mysterious Babel”; and though much of this elusiveness was caution in the face of Soviet restriction, a good part of it nevertheless had to do with the thrill of dissimulation and concealment. In a mid-Sixties Moscow speech at a meeting championing Babel’s work, Ilya Ehrenburg—the literary Houdini who managed to survive every shift of Stalinist whim—described Babel as liking to “play the fool and put on romantic airs. He liked to create an atmosphere of mystery about himself; he was secretive and never told anybody where he was going.”
Other writers (all of whom had themselves escaped the purges) came forward with recollections of Babel’s eccentricities in risky times: Babel as intrepid wanderer; as trickster, rapscallion, ironist; penniless, slippery, living on the edge, off the beaten track, down and out; seduced by the underlife of Paris, bars, whores, cabdrivers,
jockeys—all this suggests Orwellian experiment and audacity. Babel relished Villon and Kipling, and was delighted to discover that Rimbaud too was an “adventurer.” Amusing and mercurial, “he loved to play tricks on people,” according to Lev Nikulin, who was at school with Babel and remembered him “as a bespectacled boy in a rather shabby school coat and a battered cap with a green band and badge depicting Mercury’s staff.”
Trilling, writing in 1955, had of course no access to observations such as these; and we are as much in need now as Trilling was of a valid biography of Babel. Yet it is clear even from such small evidences and quicksilver portraits that Babel’s connection with the Cossacks was, if not inevitable, more natural than not; and that Trilling’s Freudian notion of the humiliated ghetto child could not have been more off the mark. For Babel lamp-oil and fearlessness were not antithetical. He was a man with the bit of recklessness between his teeth. One might almost ask how a writer so given to disguises and role-playing could
not
have put on a Cossack uniform.
“The Rebbe’s Son,” one of the
Red Cavalry
tales, is explicit about this fusion of contemplative intellect and physical danger. Ilya, the son of the Zhitomir Rebbe, “the last prince of the dynasty,” is a Red Army soldier killed in battle. The remnants of his possessions are laid out before the narrator:
Here everything was dumped together—the warrants of the agitator and the commemorative booklets of the Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. Lenin’s nodulous skull and the tarnished silk of the portraits of Maimonides. A strand of female hair had been placed in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and in the margins of Communist leaflets swarmed crooked lines of ancient Hebrew verse. In a sad and meager rain they fell on me—pages of the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges.
Babel was himself drawn to the spaciousness and elasticity of these unexpected combinations. They held no enigma for him. But while the Rebbe’s son was a kind of double patriot—loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and loyal to a dream of the betterment of Russia—Babel tended toward both theological and
(soon enough) political skepticism. His
amor patriae
was—passionately—for the Russian mother-tongue. Before the Stalinist prison clanged shut in 1935, Babel might easily have gone to live permanently in France, with his wife and daughter. Yet much as he reveled in French literature and language, he would not suffer exile from his native Russian. A family can be replaced, or duplicated; but who can replace or duplicate the syllables of Pushkin and Tolstoy? And, in fact (though his wife in Paris survived until 1957, and there was no divorce), Babel did take another wife in the Soviet Union, who gave birth to another daughter; a second family was possible. A second language was not. (Only consider what must be the intimate sorrows—even in the shelter of America, even after the demise of Communism—of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodksy, Norman Manea, and countless other less celebrated literary refugees.) By remaining in the Soviet Union, and refusing finally to bend his art to Soviet directives, Babel sacrificed his life to his language.
It was a language he did not allow to rest. He meant to put his spurs to it, and run it to unexampled leanness. He quoted Pushkin: “precision and brevity.” “Superior craftsmanship,” Babel told Munblit, “is the art of making your writing as unobtrusive as possible.” Ehrenburg recalled a conversation in Madrid with Hemingway, who had just discovered Babel. “I find that Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.… It shows what can be done,” Hemingway marveled. “Even when you’ve got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more.” Such idiosyncratic experiments in style were hardly congruent with official pressure to honor the ascent of socialism through prescriptive prose about the beauty of collective farming. Babel did not dissent from Party demands; instead he fell mainly into silence, writing in private and publishing almost nothing. His attempts at a play and a filmscript met convulsive Party criticism; the director of the film, an adaptation of a story by Turgenev, was forced into a public apology.
The
Red Cavalry
stories saw print, individually, before 1924. Soviet cultural policies in those years were not yet consolidated; it was a period of postrevolutionary leniency and ferment. Russian modernism was sprouting in the shape of formalism, acmeism,
imagism, symbolism; an intellectual and artistic avant-garde flourished. Censorship, which had been endemic to the Czarist regime, was reintroduced in 1922, but the restraints were loose. Despite a program condemning elitism, the early Soviet leadership, comprising a number of intellectuals—Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky—recognized that serious literature could not be wholly entrusted to the sensibilities of Party bureaucrats. By 1924, then, Babel found himself not only famous, but eligible eventually for Soviet rewards: an apartment in Moscow, a dacha in the country, a car and chauffeur.
Yet he was increasingly called on to perform (and conform) by the blunter rulers of a darkening repression: why was he not writing in praise of New Soviet Man? Little by little a perilous mist gathered around Babel’s person: though his privileges were not revoked (he was at his dacha on the day of his arrest), he began to take on a certain pariah status. When a leftist Congress for the Defense of Culture and Peace met in Paris, for example, Babel was deliberately omitted from the Soviet delegation, and was grudgingly allowed to attend only after the French organizers brought their protests to the Soviet Embassy.
Certain manuscripts he was careful not to expose to anyone. Among these was the remarkable journal he had kept, from June to September 1920, of the actions of Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army in eastern Poland. Because it was missing from the papers seized by the secret police at the dacha and in his Moscow flat, the manuscript escaped destruction, and came clandestinely into the possession of Babel’s (second) wife only in the 1950’s. Ehrenburg was apparently the journal’s first influential reader, though very likely he did not see it until the 1960’s, when he mentioned it publicly, and evidently spontaneously, in his rehabilitation speech:
I have been comparing the diary of the Red Cavalry with the stories. He scarcely changed any names, the events are all practically the same, but everything is illuminated with a kind of wisdom. He is saying: this is how it was. This is how the people were—they did terrible things and they suffered, they played tricks on others and they died. He made his stories out of the facts and phrases hastily jotted down in his notebook.
It goes without saying that the flatness of this essentially evasive summary does almost no justice to an astonishing historical record set down with godlike prowess in a prose of frightening clarity. In Russia the complete text of the journal finally appeared in 1990. Yale University Press brings it to us now under the title
Isaac Babel:
1920
Diary
, in an electrifying translation, accompanied by a first-rate (and indispensable) introduction. (It ought to be added that an informative introduction can be found also in the Penguin
Collected Stories
; but the reader’s dependence on such piecemeal discussions only underscores the irritating absence of a formal biography.) In 1975 Ardis Publishers, specialists in Russian studies, made available the first English translation of excerpts from the journal
(Isaac Babel: Forgotten Prose)
. That such a manuscript existed had long been known in the Soviet Union, but there was plainly no chance of publication; Ehrenburg, in referring to it, was discreet about its contents.
The
Diary
may count, then, as a kind of secret document; certainly as a suppressed one. But it is “secret” in another sense as well. Though it served as raw material for the
Red Cavalry
stories, Babel himself, in transforming private notes into daring fiction, was less daring than he might have been. He was, in fact, circumspect and selective. One can move from the notes to the stories without surprise—or put it that the surprise is in the masterliness and shock of a ripe and radical style. Still, as Ehrenburg reported, “the events are all practically the same,” and what is in the
Diary
is in the stories.
But one cannot begin with the stories and then move to the journal without the most acute recognition of what has been, substantively and for the most part, shut out of the fiction. And what has been shut out is the calamity (to say it in the most general way) of Jewish fate in Eastern Europe. The
Diary
records how the First Cavalry Army, and Babel with it, went storming through the little Jewish towns of Galicia, in Poland—towns that had endured the Great War, with many of their young men serving in the Polish army, only to be decimated by pogroms immediately afterward, at the hands of the Poles themselves. And immediately
after
that
, the invasion of the Red Cossacks. The Yale edition of the
Diary
supplies maps showing the route of Budyonny’s troops; the resonant names of these places, rendered half-romantic through the mystical tales of their legendary hasidic saints, rise up with the nauseous familiarity of their deaths: Brody, Dubno, Zhitomir, Belz, Chelm, Zamosc, etc. Only two decades after the Red Cossacks stampeded through them, their Jewish populations fell prey to the Germans and were destroyed. Riding and writing, writing and riding, Babel saw it all: saw it like a seer. “Ill-fated Galicia, ill-fated Jews,” he wrote. “Can it be,” he wrote, “that ours is the century in which they perish?”